Being able to extend the Web to make it your Web is one of the features that makes the Open Web such a fantastic platform. We should all be working on how to lower the bar for users and developers so they can do this with the greatest of ease. Writing browser extensions has been far from easy which makes it more than impressive that we see so many add-ons out there, especially in the Firefox eco-system.

How fantastic would it be if you could also install the functionality without a browser restart? Instant on. That now comes to a Firefox near you thanks to new effort to make it easier for you to super charge your browser. Aza Raskin, Atul Varma, and the Mozilla Labs team have kicked off a new experiment called Jetpack that gives you that and the ability to make extensions as easy to write as a jQuery plugin :)

As this is Mozilla Labs, we are sharing this project very early stage. We want to get feedback and a community to define where this type of thing should go. As such, there will be things missing. That being said, what are the aspirational high level goals?

Web-based

HTML, Javascript, and CSS will be the only tools required to create a Jetpack Feature

Jetpack Features will be streamed & accessible via a URL, just like the rest of the Web.

Jetpack Features will require only the minimum amount of user interaction necessary for security to install: no restarts, and just a click or two and you are good to go.

Jetpack Features will be easily debugged in the browser without restarts using common Web development tools like Firebug

Secure

Jetpack Features will have access to only the privileges they need, and security should always be presented in human-terms, and not technical-terms.

Jetpack Features will be easy to code review — making security problems more shallow, and review times shorter.

Robust

Jetpack Features will use a versioned API so that you won’t have to update & revalidate your code for every new version of Firefox.

Jetpack Features will be universal. That means if you develop a Feature for Firefox, it should also run on Fennec, Thunderbird, Songbird, or any other potentially Jetpack-enabled platform.

Jetpack Features can be lightweight but also full featured applications that add to the Web experience, just like Firefox add-ons do today.

On the Bespin team we want to make the experience as easy as possible, so we created a jetpack plugin that is installed on the newly minted 0.2 version that we just pushed to bespin.mozilla.com. The new version has a lot of new functionality including integrated VCS support, which was a big push for us as we needed that to dogfood the tool properly!

But, back to Jetpack. With the latest Bespin you get Jetpack support for free. This was incredibly exciting to us as we saw how easy it is to create a new Jetpack feature and install it into the browser in real-time.

Here is a video showing just that. We walk through the creation of a new browser sidebar that looks like this:

In the video, when I created a new jetpack via jetpack create it placed this in a jetpacks project in Bespin. This can be version controlled and shared…. just like other Bespin projects.

I am really excited to see where Jetpack can go. Being able to lower the barrier for developers to use simple Web technology that they know (and maybe love?) to extend the browser seems to be a good plan to me. To learn more, check out these resources: